Do investors want faces to go with their funds?

It’s hard to imagine ARK Invest without Cathie Wood, for example. And a small but growing number of exchange-traded funds have become associated with other financial personalities. Wedbush’s Dan Ives and Fundstrat’s Tom Lee are the personas behind successful lines of relatively new ETFs. Not only do their ideas shape the investment strategies, but their names are central to the marketing. It’s a trend that is attracting a lot of interest from investors.

“While the fund industry has shifted away from star portfolio managers running funds, there are some star‑managed ETFs, like those run by Cathie Wood’s ARK and Chris Davis’s Davis Advisors that rely on a portfolio manager making discretionary, conviction‑driven stock picks each day,” said Cindy Zarker, relationship manager at Fuse Research Network. “Essentially, [it’s] the mutual‑fund ‘star PM’ model delivered through an ETF wrapper.”

Charting a Course

Last week, Carter Worth, a financial analyst who regularly appears on CNBC, launched his own fund, the Worth Charting Options Income ETF (WRTH), which is designed to profit as short-term price changes after earnings announcements revert to normal levels. That fund uses a modified (and simply adorable-sounding) “strangle” strategy, which benefits from a stock price fluctuating in a range defined by a sold call option’s higher strike price and a sold put option’s lower strike price. It takes advantage of the decrease in the value of an option over time. “Short-term options expire worthless a high, high percentage of the time,” Worth told ETF Upside.

Funds built with technical or research frameworks differ from those of the star manager days of old, particularly because they follow rules-based methodologies instead of a portfolio manager’s daily judgment, Zarker said. “This removes key‑person risk and makes them more index‑like, even when active,” she said. “While a few well‑known analysts have packaged their research frameworks into ETFs, this remains a niche corner of the market, and we don’t view it as a huge trend in the foreseeable future.”

Still, for some of the ETFs in the niche category, having a face attached to a name has likely added wind to their sails:

• Tom Lee’s three Fundstrat Grannyshots ETFs attracted about $3.2 billion over 12 months, per Morningstar Direct. The $4.3 billion Grannyshots US Large Cap ETF (GRNY) has returned about 8% year to date and 40% over a year.
• The Dan IVES Wedbush AI Revolution ETF (IVES) dropped $5 million in the first three months of the year, but raked in nearly $900 million over 12 months. That fund is up about 5% year to date and 30% over a year.

Who Wants to Be a Billionaire? Worth built his business selling research to institutional clients, expanding it later to individuals like portfolio managers. “The most fertile ground is people who are currently customers,” he said, of potential ETF investors. “We have a brand. We have a body of work over 30 years … It’s a package.”

We’re not the betting type, but we have a feeling a few prediction-market ETFs could launch this week.

The choices are binary: Pick “yes” or “no,” and win or lose, depending on the outcome of an event. Such events, including the outcome of presidential and congressional elections, are relatively new to the world of betting, via event contracts. The first lines of ETFs that would dabble in prediction markets are indeed bets on which party triumphs in this year’s midterms and in the 2028 presidential race. Last week, GraniteShares filed a post-effective amendment to its ETF prospectuses, indicating that it plans to launch the funds May 8, unless it files again with the Securities and Exchange Commission to extend the date. Another firm, Roundhill, filed with the SEC for a Tuesday launch of its funds. And Bitwise Asset Management has also prepped a line of products.

“An ETF issuer’s job is to give investors access to investments they want, and we see a lot of interest in prediction markets,” GraniteShares CEO William Rhind told CNBC.

Can of Worms?

If anyone thought the wild expansion of thematic, single-stock and leveraged products was changing the face of the ETF business, the advent of prediction-market-style funds takes things to the next level. While most of the funds so far would focus on the outcomes of elections, Roundhill last week filed for two others: RPM Recession Yes ETF (GDPD) and RPM Recession No ETF (GDPU), which are exactly what they sound like, betting all or nothing on a US recession in 2026. “The political and recession exposures are just the ground floor. The sky is the limit on what types of creativity can get drawn up here, with enough lead time to file for a new ETF,” said Todd Sohn, chief ETF strategist at Strategas. “We will see what demand looks like, though I don’t have a strong conviction there yet. But like most new ETF and more exotic exposures, they start small and grow over time. High-yield bonds, [emerging markets], crypto, etc.”

Starting Lineup: There is one area where event-contract-style ETFs likely won’t play, at least for a while: Sports. States are fighting prediction markets in court, claiming that sports betting is covered by their own gambling laws. And the Commodity Futures Trading Commission could issue rules to restrict certain types of event contracts and curb insider trading. “The good news for the proposed launches is that much of the present fuss is about sports and not elections,” Bill Singer, a veteran Wall Street regulatory lawyer, said in a statement. “This may all glide in to play under the radar.”

Crypto is big, just not so much so with advisors … yet.

Institutional adoption has largely led to crypto’s mainstream success, reaching a global market cap of more than $2.6 trillion. The White House and federal agencies are championing digital assets. Wall Street’s biggest firms are incorporating crypto and blockchain technology into their services. And online trading platforms like Kraken, Robinhood and Coinbase give retail investors exposure to all their favorite coins.

Many advisors, however, still view crypto as too speculative and volatile to fit into a traditional financial plan. Crypto allocations are often limited to a single digit percentage of a client’s total assets or non-existent. Nevertheless, asset managers continue to pump out crypto and digital asset ETFs, partly with the goal of making wealth managers reconsider: Issuers launched almost 45 new funds last year. So what’s it going to take for advisors to hop on the bandwagon?

“Greater crypto adoption has to be a top-down approach,” said Adrian Fritz, chief investment strategist at 21Shares, a Switzerland-based crypto ETF issuer. “We always see these internal battles at firms with a few young champions who are really enthusiastic about the asset class, but the older management might be reluctant, so it doesn’t trickle down.”

ETF Upside sat down with Fritz to discuss advisors’ steadily growing acceptance of crypto products, enthusiasm for digital assets and how asset managers are trying to educate advisors on the space.

Read more.